Before you enter the horrors of the basement you hear the clipped and precise vowels of a barrister addressing a court, only booming and horribly distorted. Sure enough, it turns out to be the voice of Harvey McGregor QC, the former Warden of New College, apparently holding forth on an author's royalties. "If you take the price £15 which is agreed, I'm going to assume for the moment, if I may, and this is the most complicated part of the calculation..."
But few visitors will be riveted by this crackling courtroom recording, not least because awaiting them at the bottom of the stairs is an Oxford don, in full academic dress, clutching a blood-stained knife in his hand. At the dummy don's feet lie two broken bottles of port, a crumpled blood-splattered Oxford University T-shirt and a sub-machine gun, while from her cell in the far end a model of the Patron Saint of Oxford, St Frideswide, serenely surveys the grisly scene.
"Do you like it?" Andrew Malcolm, the proud creator of all this mayhem shouts from the top of the stairs. "From the piety of Frideswide to the avarice of the modern don. Get it?"
He has called his macabre exhibition at 12 Broad Street, Another Oxford Story. The real Oxford Story exhibition, which happens to be just a couple of doors further along The Broad, not surprisingly took exception to this bizarre new chamber of horrors on its doorstep. But Malcolm has stayed open, for when it comes to causing offence in Oxford, he is something of a specialist. It would now appear to be the great mission of his life.
His decision to open perhaps the strangest bookshop and exhibition ever in Oxford is only the latest chapter in a remarkable feud with Oxford University Press and, increasingly, Oxford University itself. The story of how this gifted and jovial Cambridge philosophy graduate with audacious ambitions to produce a major work fusing drama and philosophy, ended up consumed by bitterness and reduced to running this little shop of horrors is a sad and salutary one.
It began way back in 1984 when Malcolm submitted his book, Making Mames, on which he had been working for more than a decade, to the OUP. The company's eventual decision not to publish the book which the author believed they had accepted was to result in a six-year legal battle. Malcolm sued the OUP for breach of contract, arguing that the press had given a verbal agreement to publish. He lost in the High Court, which found he had a "strong moral though not a legal commitment". The philosopher's decision to fight has cost him dear financially - £50,000 in legal bills so far with another £12,500 to find for OUP costs.
He will tell you that Malcolm versus the Chancellor Masters and scholars of Oxford University is the most important contract case in the history of publishing. But the legal battle would also suggest that hell hath no fury like a philosopher scorned. For Malcolm has become a man obsessed by the case and what he sees as a terrible injustice. He has written, and published himself, a 280-page book, The Remedy, about "his long and miserable" journey through the courts, and terrible humiliations heaped upon his life's great work. The OUP's rejection and the subsequent case, he will tell you, has blighted his career as an author and philosopher.
Professor Alan Ryan, the Warden of New College and the OUP delegate at the centre of the case, in a letter to The Times Higher Education Supplement certainly seemed to recognise the terrible impact on the author. "I regret," wrote Ryan, "that Malcolm has subsequently devoted his life to a vendetta against OUP. He conducts it with a literary verve that makes one wish he would direct his talents to something more productive."
Over many months we have seen Malcolm's campaign of attrition against the OUP's tax-exempt charitable status, that most sensitive of issues for the Press which recently faced having to repay "a substantial sum" of tax on profits made in India since 1973. Two years ago, he printed 25,000 anti-OUP leaflets planned for distribution in the Oxford Star, a sister paper of The Oxford Times. There have been exhibition stands at book fairs, a website, the creation of his own company, AKME Publications, and an endless stream of letters to newspapers and dons and delegates. And now there's his own Oxford bookshop, AKME Expression, in the very heart of the enemy camp, just across the road from Balliol College.
The windows carry posters about the Oxford University Freedom of Expression Appeal while the walls are adorned with enlarged print-outs of just about every newspaper story that has embarrassed the University in recent times, such as the Pembroke College "cash for access scandal". The creator of this gallery of Oxford scandals, however, refuses to admit to being driven by hatred. "One of the student papers described the shop as a monument to an obsession. It's not that. No, it's a grand comedy sketch."
Foreign visitors stumble in to discover a shop rather less well stocked than Blackwell's and Waterstone's and few leave laughing. Only two books are on sale: The Remedy, the detailed story of the case, and Making Mames, his 200,000-word platonic dialogue. Bemused tourists are usually treated to a potted history of the great fall-out: how his famous breach of contract victory over Oxford University in the Court of Appeal in 1990 ended with defeat in a High Court and how, in an agreement "unique in publishing history" the university undertook never again to publicly denigrate his controversial text.
Those with a taste for publishing law, or with any kind of grievance against the university, will then be gleefully told about how they can qualify for places or degrees at AKME University. The Presidency of Trickery College is priced at £12,500, the Mastership of Broke College is going for £500, while a first-class degree (any subject) is a snip at £200. And, of course, now he has created his new attraction in the basement.
Malcolm, 53, the father of a five-year-old son, Luke, travelled up from his home in Brighton, where he works in building and property. He gave up teaching years ago and began writing Making Mames. Those tempted to write him off as a joker should read the quotations on the back of his books. One of the 20th century's leading philosophers, Sir Karl Popper, wrote: "I think very highly of Malcolm's gifts. He has the heart of a dramatist, the soul of a poet. He has caught the true spirit of Greek tragedy," while the former Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, Roy Edgley, observed in his courtroom testimony: "Making Mames is an exceptional piece of work, highly unusual in both its content and presentation."
Malcolm insists there is nothing in the least tragic about this latest stunt. "I am here to sell my books and try to raise money to pay the University." Earlier he had promised to raise more than £12,500 to endow a lectureship in publishing a law, an offer the OUP declined.
But for all his gift for farce and his insistence that he has made lots of new friends in Oxford, he remains a hurt and angry man. His delight in the news that his bete noir, Professor Ryan, is leaving Oxford for California on a year's sabbatical after putting noses out of joint by arguing that "no rational person would work in British higher education", is palpable.
"People talk about me being obsessive," Malcolm told me, when I finally moved him off the subject of Professor Ryan's departure. "I hate what has been done to me and the unspeakable way the whole thing has unfolded. Something has gone wrong. This place is not living up to its ideals. I could not have lived with myself if I hadn't sued. If I'd not tried I would have been left without a shred of self-respect."
Dr Henry Hardy, who was a senior editor in OUP's General Books Department when Malcolm submitted the typescript of Making Mames, said: "I still agree with what the original judge said, that Malcolm was treated harshly in the moral sense. He was encouraged to think that his book would be published and was disappointed." Dr Hardy, a fellow of Wolfson College, who has edited lectures and works of Isaiah Berlin, faced disciplinary proceedings at the OUP and allegations that he had acted beyond his authority in his dealings with Malcolm.
He finds Malcolm's subsequent behaviour to be at the same time "understandable and rather remarkable". "Most people would not go to such lengths to pursue a cause that might seem lost, even in Oxford, famous as the home of lost causes. I have to say I feel a certain qualified admiration for him." He is now hoping a sufficient number of friendly dons will bring his situation to the attention of the university's Parliament, the Congregation, in the hope that the costs still owed by Malcolm might be set aside.
A spokesman for OUP said the relationship between Mr Malcolm and OUP had been covered by the media over 10 years, and there was nothing new that the company wanted to say. But Oxford University Professor of Physics, Joshua Silver, said he would be discussing the case with his colleagues. "I found Malcolm's book on the case fascinating. It raised many important issues and I'm surprised by many of the actions that were taken. There is a possibility it could be raised at Congregation."
The lease on the bookshop ends this weekend, with the occasion marked by an AKMÉ Ball in the shop tonight. But after all pretend blood has been mopped up, more unpleasant surprises are promised by the slighted philosopher. Whatever the academic merits of Making Mames, this largely unread book already has a place in history at Oxford University Press, with the story far from over.
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